Your impact

As a Senior Engineer on our Feed team, you’ll have the opportunity to play a pivotal role in scaling one of the most impactful areas of our platform – the social feed. This is a high-impact role where you’ll shape the experiences that connect millions of students with career opportunities. You’ll also work closely with data science and machine learning teams to optimize feed relevance, personalization, and ranking, ensuring the right content reaches the right users at the right time.

Your role

As a Senior Software Engineer, your day-to-day will involve:

• Building and Scaling Feed Systems: Scaling feed infrastructure to deliver personalized, relevant content (ranking, retrieval, and recommendations).
• Optimizing and Iterating: Continuously testing and refining the user’s experience on the feed, and improving overall performance, responsiveness, and user engagement.
• Driving Platform Scalability: Designing systems to handle millions of users, including high-traffic, real-time content delivery, and scalable feed/data infrastructure, ensuring high availability and reliability.
• Collaborating with Data and ML Teams: Working closely with data scientists and ML engineers to support their models that power recommendations and personalization.
• Data Management/Flow: Developing data pipelines, enhancing data schemas, and managing data ingestion to leverage real-time, distributed data, ultimately strengthening feed infrastructure and engagement loops.
• Shaping Product Direction: Leveraging data-driven insights to guide product roadmaps, prioritize features, create use cases, recognize limitations, and make impactful decisions that enhance the feed experience.

Your experience

We’re seeking candidates who bring:

• Feed and Ranking: Experience building or optimizing social feeds, real-time content delivery systems, feed infrastructure, and data pipelines, ideally focusing on relevance and personalization.
• Scalable Systems Background: Contributing to the design and development of scalable, high-performance backend systems, including building data pipelines to support machine learning models.
• Backend Skills: Proficiency in Go, Elasticsearch, GraphQL, and Ruby on Rails.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: A history of working closely with data, ML, product, and design teams to deliver impactful user experiences.
• Technical Leadership: Experience fostering a culture of technical excellence and supporting the growth of engineering teams.
• Strong Communication Skills: Clearly articulating technical concepts to technical and non-technical audiences.

About us

Handshake is the career platform for Gen Z. With a community of over 17 million students, alumni, employers, and career educators, Handshake’s network is where career advice and discovery turn into first, second, and third jobs. Nearly 1 million companies use Handshake to build their future workforce—from Fortune 500 to federal agencies, school districts to startups, healthcare systems to small businesses. Handshake is built for where you’re going, not where you’ve been.

When it comes to our workforce strategy, we’ve thought deeply about how work-life should look at Handshake. With our hybrid-work model, employees benefit from collaboration and shared team experiences three days per week in our vibrant offices, and enjoy the flexibility of remote work two days per week (unless noted in the specific job posting). Handshake is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in New York, London, and Berlin.

What we offer

At Handshake, we'll give you the tools to feel healthy, happy and secure.

Benefits below apply to US employees in full-time positions.

• ???? Equity and ownership in a fast-growing company.
• ???? 16 Weeks of paid parental leave for birth giving parents & 10 weeks of paid parental leave for non-birth giving parents.
• ???? Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision policies including LGTBQ+ Coverage. We also provide resources for Mental Health Assistance, Employee Assistance Programs and counseling support.
• ???? Generous learning & development opportunities and an annual $2,000 stipend for you to grow your skills and career.
• ???? Financial coaching through Origin to help you through your financial journey.
• ???? Monthly internet stipend and a brand new MacBook to allow you to do your best work.
• ???? Monthly commuter stipend for you to expense your travel to the office (for office-based employees).
• ???? Free lunch provided 3x a week across all offices.
• ???? Referral bonus to reward you when you bring great talent to Handshake.
• ???? 401k Match: Handshake offers a dollar-for-dollar match on 1% of deferred salary, up to a maximum of $1,200 per year.
• ???? All full-time US-based Handshakers are eligible for our flexible time off policy to get out and see the world. In addition, we offer 13 standardized holidays, and 2 additional days of flexible holiday time off. Lastly, we have a Winter #ShakeBreak, a one-week period of Collective Time Off.
• ???? Handshake offers $500 home office stipend for you to spend during your first 3 months to create a productive and comfortable workspace at home.
• ???? Family support: Parental leave coaching and support provided by Parentaly. We partner with Maven Clinic to provide a lifetime coverage up to $15K for expenses related to fertility and family forming!
• ???? Lifestyle Savings Account: We offer you an annual stipend of $500 to use for purchases such as fitness classes, gym memberships, work-from-home setup, and more.

Looking for more? Explore our mission, values and comprehensive US benefits at joinhandshake.com/careers.

Handshake is committed to providing reasonable accommodations in our recruitment processes for candidates with disabilities, sincerely held religious beliefs or other reasons protected by applicable laws. If you need assistance or reasonable accommodation, please let your recruiter know during initial communications.